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Forum:Alignment categories
OK, so a month or two back it was being discussed how Jane and Jade should be handled in terms of their alignment categories I offered the arguement that due to Homestuck's nature with a cast of morally grey characters that our categories were out of date. In the recent Aranea discussions I mentioned that protagonist =/= hero and antagonist =/= villain and that due to Homestuck's tendency to let us "be" various characters that almost every major character, hero and villain, is both a protagonist and antagonist. That being said I never really had a solution to offer so I just let it drop. However now the MSPA Forum decided to discuss it and all the points I have mentioned have been brought up by others with little opposition, so yeah, I don't think we can continue to sweep the issue under the carpet. So we have a few possibilities: *Expand the system to try to account for more variation e.g. Keep the protagonist and antagonist categories but add something like a deuteragonist category, which people on the forum are arguing is the correct definition of Aranea's position in the story. *Rework the system entirely e.g. Remove the protagonist and antagonist categories and replace them with something like hero, anti-hero, anti-villain and villain. *Dump the alignment system completely. *Continue to sweep the issue under the rug. Also why are our neutral and undetermined categories combined? They are completely separate ideas, using the category by itself doesn't help people know if the character is unknown or neutral. Also I think it may have been incorrectly removed from certain characters pages because of the undetermined part (Also I think Aradia might fit in both the neutral and protagonist categories right now, but she certainly isn't undetermined). - The Light6 (talk) 17:50, September 15, 2013 (UTC) :This certainly isn't an easy thing to categorize, especially with characters sometimes appearing to change alignment at different points in the story. Spades, for example, appears to finally be taking an antagonistic turn (much to my dismay). The only thing I can really think to easily recommend right now is splitting the neutral and undetermined categories. 18:27, September 15, 2013 (UTC) The system is from a time when there weren't that many characters yet, so I guess that's why "undetermined" and "neutral" is lumped together for example. We do need a new system, or either abandon it completely. I think splitting undetermined and neutral is definetly a thing we can do. The rest is more complicated. One other option aside from the things already mentioned is the "evil - neutral - good", "lawful - neutral -chaotic" system, that would be a total of 9 categories (lawful evil, neutral chaotic etc etc) + "undetermined" though, and it would still not quite work since some characters still would fit into one category first and later into another. It would also make the whole thing more complicated. At the same time terms like anti-hero still wouldn't completely fit vriska for example, because she also has positive traits. I think we can't avoid that some characters will end up in multiple categories, and as far as I am concerned that is completely fine. So if we go with hero, anti-hero, villain and anti-villain, then Aranea would be "anti-villain" and "hero", and Vriska would be "anti-hero" and "hero". The only downside of that would be that it is unclear wether both categories apply at the same time or if a character simply has changed sides/behaviour. If we want to be really anal then we have to keep "protagonist" and "antagonist" as well though, because for axample Caliborn is a protagonist...but clearly a villain, not an anti-hero, but a straight up villain. So it needs to be possible to combine the "protagonist" and "villain" categories. I don't know, it's complicated... 20:01, September 15, 2013 (UTC) I have an idea: rather than trying to create a consistent system of mutually exclusive categories, can we instead create a system of overlapping tags? E.g.: "Heroes and allies," "villains and allies" as potentially overlapping tags (eg for Jade and Jane), plus a "defectors/multiple allegiances" tag (there's gotta be a better word for that!) for characters whose loyalty has shifted at some point by whatever means. "Playable character" vs "non-playable character"—cleaner than protagonist/antagonist This isn't really definitive but I think this general system makes the most sense here.